Technical Books

Learning Python

Python is "that language with the whitespace rules." In particular, what that means is that code blocks are defined by indentation. Which seems weird and annoying, until you try to read somebody else's program and the meaning just slides quite painlessly right on into your cerebral cortex, almost effortlessly. So yeah. And, to quote Bruce Eckel,

With Python, it has always felt like the designers were saying, "We're trying to make your life easier, and that's it. Making your life easier is the thing that we're not compromising on."

That's why I'm learning Python, because most of what I (and probably most programmers today) do is edit other people's code. I want that to be as easy as possible.

Database Design for Mere Mortals

This book is only ostensibly about database design, at least with respect to the more technical aspects of that process. It is primarily about how to accurately and efficiently provide what an organization needs, especially if they don't really know what they want either. That wasn't really what I was looking for, so I found myself skipping chapters. There is some good content in the book, but there is also a lot of repeated content. I could pick that out even though I only read I'd say 40% of the book while skipping over the less technical fluff.

Design Patterns

Design Patterns is by many accounts as close as you can get to Object Oriented Programming's Bible... I'm not an avid user of the languages that these patterns are designed for, so I didn't really "get" the advantages that using these types of patterns give, since I can just take them for granted in most cases. Nonetheless, it was a good read overall.

Dynamic HTML

There's so much in this book. It's the most comprehensive front-end web developer's reference I've found. From HTML to CSS to JavaScript and DOM, it's got everything you could possibly need to look up while designing a website.

Games, Diversions & Perl Culture

Although it's self-described as "useless" from a technical standpoint (which I don't entirely agree with), it's also described as entertaining, and the best of the Best of the Perl Journal series at "captur[ing] the spirit of Perl."

Mastering Regular Expressions

I find regular expressions (regexes) extremely useful. Some people love to bring up the quote "now they have two problems" whenever regexes are brought up. I think that quote is appropriate sometimes, but in many cases, regexes replace much larger sections of code and are much more readable and much less complex than said code.
This book is all about regular expessions, and the details behind the scenes. It has specific examples from several languages including Perl, Java, and .NET IIRC. I've already learned several interesting facts I didn't know before (you don't have to escape metacharacters inside character classes), so the book is already worth it to me.